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Grad student's family arrives from embattled Kenya

Posted: Thursday, February 21, 2008

After two months of worry, Peter Gachanja is happy.

The University of Georgia graduate student reunited with his wife and son this week and knows they now are safe from the ethnic violence that has left more than 1,000 people dead in their native Kenya.

"I am happy. Very happy," Peter Gachanja said Wednesday.

Wife Serah Nyakio and son Victor arrived at Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport on Monday after a journey from Nairobi that stretched out over two days.

After a day of rest, the family set out Wednesday to enroll Victor in school and lease an apartment for what will be an extended visit.

Gachanja, studying for a master's degree in Romance languages at UGA, has worked to get his family here since December, when a disputed presidential election led to ethnic violence that shook his native country.

He hasn't yet been able to get visas that would allow his two daughters, Bethany Wairimu and Zipporah Wamubi, to come to the United States. But he feels they are safe for now, in a part of Kenya that has been relatively untouched by the violence of the past two months.

Gachanja's uncle was killed, burned alive inside his home - not by an angry mob, Gachanja suspects, but by thugs hired by politicians.

Gachanja already had planned to bring Serah and Victor to the United States when they could afford the trip, probably in March.

But getting them out began to seem urgent as the threat of violence kept Serah, an accountant, trapped at home instead of going to her job in Mombassa, a Kenyan coastal city.

The donor is a man awaiting a heart transplant, Bellew said. He had accumulated one million Delta frequent flyer miles by using a credit card to pay his medical bills, Bellew said. The miles he donated will be enough to fly Gachanja's daughters to the United States, once the family can get visas for them, she said.

Spending time with his wife and son has lifted Gachanja's spirits this week, but his hopes for the future of his country still are dim.

At the family's home near Mombassa, their garden already is uprooted, and someone cut down the coconut palms they planted seven years ago. The house itself may be destroyed, Gachanja worries, now that no relatives are there to watch over it.

Doctors, lawyers and other professionals - educated people with means - are leaving Kenya, he said.

Gachanja believes politicians on both sides of the election dispute are to blame for the ethnic tension that threatens the future of Kenya, once considered a model of African multicultural democracy.

"Once you put politicians into the equation, you don't know what can happen," he said. "It is like a pendulum. It is set in motion, and they cannot stop it."